Frequently, when I work on a notebook, I wish I could know the list of the notebooks that depend on it. Two particular use cases:
- I make a breaking change, and I want to go fix my other notebooks that depend on it (or alert other users in the rare cases where somebody else uses my code)
- I want to delete the notebook, but not to break someone else (or my) code. Obviously, deleting a notebook would also break links from outside Observable or saved as bookmarks, but it’s another problem (generally it’s not a problem for notebooks I want to delete).
For my notebooks, I imagine I could find the import statements using code from https://observablehq.com/@fil/my-notebooks and https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/notebook-visualizer and get a list of my dependencies. For other users’ notebooks, it’s more difficult, even impossible for private notebooks. But maybe Observable could give the count of notebooks that depend on it, or even a boolean (there is at least one dependency, or not)
What do you think? Is it a common need? And is there already any way to do something near?
